Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 15:35:47 +0000, Not Bill Gates wrote:

> Heck, I dunno.  Like you, I don't even really care all that much.  

You don't care that innovation in desktop software has been crippled by
the actions of the monopoly player Microsoft?

In 1988, there were something like ten or a dozen word processors
available to choose from, and they were competing on price and features
like crazy. That was then, now there is just MS Office. The most
innovative things Microsoft has added to Office in the last decade? Clippy
the paperclip. An XML wrapper to their binary file format. And the
incredible disappearing and reappearing menus.

You don't care that the cost of OS and office software has risen, rather
than fallen, because of the monopoly power of Microsoft?

You don't care that because of Microsoft's neglect, there are millions of
zombie PCs running their sub-standard OS across the world, sending
hundreds of millions of spam emails? I can tell you, even if you are lucky
enough to not be receiving spams, you are still paying for it in higher
ISP costs, because *they* certainly are receiving those spams and trying
to block them.

It must be nice to be so free of cares...


> Maybe they were trying to protect themselves against all the market 
> momentum they'd created around 0S/2.  They'd been big fans of it 
> right up until Windows 3.0 took off.

That would be a good guess, except that Microsoft's predatory and illegal
behaviour began long before OS/2 was even planned. It began in the mid
1970s, with MS DOS.



-- 
Steven.